It is no longer a question, in fact, of repeating what had already been said（言下之意，中世纪和文艺复兴时期的释经学是以对已经被言说的事物的“评论”或“重复”）, but of defining through what figures and images, by following what order, to what expressive ends, and in order to declare what truth, God or the Prophets had given a discourse the particular form in which it was communicated to us. (查看原文)
criticism judges it (representation and truth) and profanes it. Now as language in the irruption of its being, and questioning it as to its secret, commentary halts before the precipice of the original text, and assumes the impossible and endless task of repeating its own birth within itself: it sacralises language. (查看原文)
lastly , the purpose of arousing in the other the representation corresponding to the cry or gesture (but with this particularity, that by emitting a cry, I do not arouse, and do not intend to arouse, the sensation of hunger, but the representation of the relation between this sign and my own desire to eat). Language is possible only upon the basis of this entanglement. It rests not upon a natural movement of comprehension or expression, but upon the reversible and analysable relations of signs and representations. Language does not come into being when representation is exteriorised, but only when, in a concerted fashion, it detaches a sign from itself and cause itself to be represented by that sign. (查看原文)
Modern thought, from its inception and in its very density, is a certain mode of action. . . . Thought had already “left” itself in its own being as early as the nineteenth century; it is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions, it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave. . . . At the level of its existence, in its very dawning, [thought] is in itself an action—a perilous act. (查看原文)
